Titus 1:10-11

‘For there are many unruly men, vain talkers and deceivers, especially they of the circumcision, whose mouths must be stopped. Men who overthrow whole houses, teaching things which they ought not, for filthy lucre’s sake.’

The Cretan church was clearly plagued with men who ignored the church leadership and did their own thing, ‘unruly men’. And they were called this because their message was also unorthodox. They were vain talkers about idle speculations and deceivers in that they portrayed their ideas as being true to Christian teaching, when they were not. And a great number of them were Jewish so-called ‘Christians’, who replaced the central message of the cross and resurrection (Titus 2:14; Titus 3:4-6) by offering fanciful interpretations of the Old Testament (1 Timothy 1:4; 1 Timothy 1:7; 1 Timothy 6:20; 2 Timothy 2:16) and the way of asceticism which resulted in a requirement to observe laws of cleanliness (1 Timothy 4:3), abstain from marriage (1 Timothy 4:3) and the observance of particular feasts (Colossians 2:16-17; Colossians 2:20-23). Their aim was to make themselves ‘pure’.

Thus Paul says, ‘their mouths must be stopped (muzzled).’ This will be best achieved by so presenting the truth that falsehood falls away. But the more persistent ones must, if necessary, in the end be disciplined (1 Timothy 1:20). The fact that that is not mentioned here suggests that Paul is hopeful that Titus will be able to win them back to Christ.

‘Men who overthrow whole houses, teaching things which they ought not, for filthy lucre’s sake.’ In some parts things were getting pretty bad. They were inveigling themselves into households and then ‘overthrowing them’ by convincing them of their false speculations. This may mean that they set them in disarray, or even that they converted them altogether. And all the time many of them were doing it in order to make a profit out of it. Such is the depths to which their ‘Christian’ testimony had fallen. Paul probably knew of one or to cases where this had happened. p> Titus 1:12 ‘One of themselves, a prophet of their own, said, “Cretans are always liars, evil beasts, idle gluttons”.’

He then cites a quotation from Epimenides, “Cretans are always liars, evil beasts, idle gluttons”. Epimenides was described in Greek literature as a prophet, and Paul is therefore putting them on the spot. Either they reject this description of them, thus decrying one of ‘their own prophets’, or they accept his description and condemn themselves. Meanwhile he is citing something that the majority of Greeks would have confirmed, and doing it in terms of one of their own.

The writing is not extant, but is referred to in the early fathers. Some, however, impute it to Callimachus who cites half of it in a hymn to Zeus. The Cretians in fact had a reputation for being liars because they claimed that the tomb of Zeus was in Crete, which offended those who saw him as a god and very much ‘alive’. Indeed they coined the word ‘kretizein’ meaning a ‘Cretan liar’. Here, however, Paul uses pseustai, the normal word for liars.

The description fits the false teachers. They are lying, they are behaving like animals, and they are greedy.